Sheriff’s deputies said they found the couple’s 13 children ranging in age from 2 to 29 years old, some of them chained to furniture, all of them thin and malnourished. The 17-year-old girl who escaped was so tiny that deputies initially mistook her for a 10-year-old.

Riverside County Sheriff’s Capt. Greg Fellows said the 911 call came from a cellphone that had been deactivated but still worked for emergency calls.

When deputies found the girl he said she showed them family photos that prompted them to visit the house. Authorities confronted the girl’s mother, Louise Anna Turpin, and Fellows said she appeared “perplexed” as to why they had come.

A young woman led deputies to a California home where her 12 brothers and sisters were locked up in filthy conditions, with some of them malnourished and chained to beds. Riverside County deputies arrested her parents on Sunday. (Jan. 16)

Turpin, 49, and her husband, David Allen Turpin, 57, were jailed on $9 million bail. They were scheduled for an initial court appearance on Thursday. Authorities said the pair could face charges of torture and child endangerment.

“If you can imagine being 17 years old and appearing to be a 10-year-old, being chained to a bed, being malnourished and injuries associated with that, I would call that torture,” Fellows said.

He said there was no indication any of the children were sexually abused, although that was still being investigated.

Neither sheriff’s deputies nor child welfare officials received a single call over the years about the Turpin home, he said.

The investigation, still in its early stages, has already begun to unravel a surreal tale of a couple married 32 years who sometimes dressed their children alike, kept them away from outsiders and cut the boys’ hair in a Prince Valiant-style resembling that of their graying father. Photos show nearly all the girls with shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle.

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